What does SHTF/TEOTWAWKI mean to you?

This is a discussion on What does SHTF/TEOTWAWKI mean to you? within the General Firearm Discussion forums, part of the Related Topics category; Originally Posted by atctimmy
I will go live with the Amish. I don't think life will change for them in any way. :)
Except they ...

Short and sweet: Nationwide strikes..Political unrest......no trucks running, no food. Prepare for food shortage, medicine shortage and protecting what you have from those that come looking.
Be prepared to defend your world and your families in a place you choose, for me that will not be on the run.

Your chances of long term survival increase considerably if you can survive the first few weeks/months of SHTF. Anything crisis lasting longer than that will be EOTWAWKI and all bets are off. The key will be to survive long enough to see it.

JW Rawles "The Patriots" is a best practices of preparedness. I'm working on HAM and EMT training to augment basic survival skills. Search the internet for "ferfal" to read about what can happen in a socio-economic collapse on a regional scale.

Anyone not preparing to survive in a very hostile world is not very realistic.

One good reason to store enough food for every member of the family...for at least a solid month & (better still) TWO is that we may yet experience a global airborne transmittable viral pandemic. It's still a real and eventual possibility.
That virus has been constantly mutating.

If you can stay completely OUT & AWAY from exposure to the general population for the first infectious wave then your chances for unaffected survival are exponentially increased.

Prepared to head for higher ground, with others with the same mindset that my family knows and trusts, Being able to supply my closest friends and family with enough ammo and firepower to overcome or at least keep at bay, all the bad two and four legged creatures that may want to eat or steal/kill us. let's see.........30k rounds of belt fed 308......15K rounds of belted 8mm mauser (for the other 2 belt feds) 35K rounds of 223.(AC556 and M4 type guns with "go fast" switches.....with one having the M203 under it)...20K rounds of 9mm...(MP5s/uzis MACs and handguns(...20K rounds of 45acp...(2 thompsons and 1911 typ guns).....30K rounds of 30-06 some is armor percing for the BAR.......35K rounds for the 2AK guns. about 1000 rounds each of 357 mag and 38 spl....and about 5K rounds of 22 rimfire (supressed and select fire 10/22 rifle)
PLENTY of food and water for us as we'll share all we have in order to survive.....I think that about covers it..

SHTF for me would be at least a Katrina type event in the Houston metro area. Ike was interesting but we had power back in my neighborhood in less than a week. No looting in my area.
EOTWAWKI would be an event the scale of which would prevent any meaningful government response for at least six months.
SHTF we are ready for. EOTWAWKI would not be comfortable but would be manageable for a few months. After that it would get ugly.

To give you a potential flavor of what might happen, go find "Lights Out", an Internet (only)- published book. Don't go crazy with it, it's fiction - but parts of it are highly plausible. Read and digest.

Well, for me, it really doesn't matter what the cause or situation is. Man made civil unrest, natural disaster or zombie uprising... I'm pretty much a self reliant kind of guy and I have a very small network of friends whose skills and capabilities make up where I lack. I have a co-op home garden with my daughter and son-in-law and one of my co-workers, and share the proceeds among ourselves and we can any of the excesses for storage. My new house has a much bigger yard so I may expand the size of the garden this year. Also the entire yard is fenced.

I plan on staying home in the fortified home I just bought and I am prepared to defend it. No one is going to just waltz in and take stuff. I have steel entry doors on all entrances and since buying the house I have added steel reinforced Strikemaster door jambs and top of the line dead bolts on all exterior doors. This summer I'll be adding 3M security film to my windows. The house came with pretty decent motion sensor lights already installed on the outside, but I may change locations of a couple to maximize their effectiveness. In the next 2 years I'll be converting the two car attached garage into a master bedroom suite which will have a couple additional security features I won't elaborate on.

If circumstances dictate that I leave my castle and move elsewhere due to a health epidemic in my local area or other type of circumstance, I can become mobile and move to a variety of other locations already established with other folks who live at those other locations. Those peoples permanent homestead becomes my refugee camp if I have to bug out from my home and in return, my permanent location becomes their refugee camp if they have to evacuate on a reciprocal basis. Some of those are relatives and others are just good friends I have known for decades and also believe in self reliance. I am adequately armed, equipped and supplied for any excursions away from home base which I may be forced to make.

In the end, whatever happens, happens. I have made some plans, some preparations and some contingencies, and thought through things thoroughly and logically, but I'm not what a lot of people would consider a hard core survivalist or prepper. But I am well ahead of the game than most people I know and the general masses.

To give you a potential flavor of what might happen, go find "Lights Out", an Internet (only)- published book. Don't go crazy with it, it's fiction - but parts of it are highly plausible. Read and digest.

It appears Lights Out is a TV show, a published book and a game, also. Do you have anything else to go by to narrow the search down?

Prepared to head for higher ground, with others with the same mindset that my family knows and trusts, Being able to supply my closest friends and family with enough ammo and firepower to overcome or at least keep at bay, all the bad two and four legged creatures that may want to eat or steal/kill us. let's see.........30k rounds of belt fed 308......15K rounds of belted 8mm mauser (for the other 2 belt feds) 35K rounds of 223.(AC556 and M4 type guns with "go fast" switches.....with one having the M203 under it)...20K rounds of 9mm...(MP5s/uzis MACs and handguns(...20K rounds of 45acp...(2 thompsons and 1911 typ guns).....30K rounds of 30-06 some is armor percing for the BAR.......35K rounds for the 2AK guns. about 1000 rounds each of 357 mag and 38 spl....and about 5K rounds of 22 rimfire (supressed and select fire 10/22 rifle)
PLENTY of food and water for us as we'll share all we have in order to survive.....I think that about covers it..

Don't forget a lot of diesel fuel for the 18-wheeler you'll need to carry almost 200,000 rounds of ammo!

Prepared to head for higher ground, with others with the same mindset that my family knows and trusts, Being able to supply my closest friends and family with enough ammo and firepower to overcome or at least keep at bay, all the bad two and four legged creatures that may want to eat or steal/kill us. let's see.........30k rounds of belt fed 308......15K rounds of belted 8mm mauser (for the other 2 belt feds) 35K rounds of 223.(AC556 and M4 type guns with "go fast" switches.....with one having the M203 under it)...20K rounds of 9mm...(MP5s/uzis MACs and handguns(...20K rounds of 45acp...(2 thompsons and 1911 typ guns).....30K rounds of 30-06 some is armor percing for the BAR.......35K rounds for the 2AK guns. about 1000 rounds each of 357 mag and 38 spl....and about 5K rounds of 22 rimfire (supressed and select fire 10/22 rifle)
PLENTY of food and water for us as we'll share all we have in order to survive.....I think that about covers it..

Holy crap man!,You are the SHTF man.
You ever think about over-throwing a middleeastern country?

Toward SHTF my focus has been on tools and tactics.
Having the a reasonable minimum of tools at hand so as to apply functional tactics to support one of two goals; Evade and/or Endure (As to come out the other end as being a survivor).
All else is secondary and tertiary effort so as to support this primary initiative.

Toward TEOTWAWKI my focus has been on flexibility of functional knowledge and being.
I could have a decades worth of food & supplies stowed in my house along with enough guns & ammo to outfit Jim Bowie & Friends as at the Alamo.
But what good is that to me if my storage container aka 'house' is blown away, flooded or knocked to the ground....Or is not inhabitable due to C/B/V issue and by that immediate and longer term (greater than one week) mandatory evacuation process. All that logistically difficult to pack up and transport gear & equipment becomes a monetarily high value but functionally useless mass of junk, left behind for looters and short term thinking criminals as well as the desperate to attempt to steal in your mandatory govt. enforced absence.
For those who think the latter cannot happen and is against the law and Constitution blah blah blah... Very simply recall what happened and was the manner of ground conditions immediately after 9/11 in NYC. Ask anyone who was there that actually _lived_ near by about evacuation and police cordons and how return to ones residence or effort to secure personal property (vehicles) was functionally denied. That is just one example, not the latest nor the only or an outlier.

Instead I depend on training my brain to be able to think flexibly.
Understanding my surroundings and not just my neighborhood but rather my locality and the region too. I have street maps, topo maps and my wife has a GPS. Should the batteries or satellites go down I've got paper. Should I lose a piece of paper I've got a second. Should the roads & highways be blocked I've got a topo map to match against a road/street map to if necessary go overland making my own path so to speak.
As to defense I have small arms that are functional for transport on body as well as being relatively easy to disguise and hide. Also they are in common calibers should I 'find' ammunition.
Additionally I'm in good physical conditioning for my age. This is key.
Under such circumstance again looking at 9/11 and Katrina among a number of others, the day before people would have sworn they 'felt fine'. The day of they feel stressed. Inside of a week later, people are outright dying in the streets due to stress their bodies can't take, lack of life immediate meds, inability to move their own body from danger and to safety (KATRINA!) as well as inability to biologically deal with going light on food and water for a week.
Then there are those who crack mentally from the I don't recognize this, what happened to my routine and I'm afraid/alone strain of an event.

I'm not concerned about having masses of ammunition and food stored.
I have no intent nor would I think to attempt engagement in a protracted firefight from within the NOT BULLET RESISTANT vinyl, wood and gypsum board walls of my home. That makes no sense. Especially when I'd be trapped inside and just a Molotov cocktail or three of being burned out or burned up alive, with my beef jerky and deer rifle in hand. No thank you I'm not at all that attached to my house, the stuff inside of it and my mortgage.
My primary concern is to be safe and to keep my family safe. That very likely means being light and mobile as well as flexible in physical and mental being.
If the NE goes up in smoke, then I re-locate to the Mid-Atlantic. If the eastern seaboard goes up in smoke then I relocate to the Gulf of Mexico. If the US goes up in smoke then I relocate to Canada....Or if necessary I commandeer a sea worthy ship and on the fly I make use of all my tools and mental faculties to learn what I need to learn so that I can do what I need to do.

Don't forget a lot of diesel fuel for the 18-wheeler you'll need to carry almost 200,000 rounds of ammo!

I was thinking the exact same thing.

He'll need a whole lot of fuel for the very large vehicle he'd need to be able to move all that stuff.
As well he'd need a security force of at least three separate vehicles in a minimum of two man teams with radios to provide rolling security through checkpoints, toward they done lost their mind civilians as well as active opportunistic criminals. Further this truck had better be armored and it's powertrain systems hardened....Which adds additional weight an mass to the vehicle further increasing the need for either lots of heavy on-board fuel and/or a resupply truck to add to this Road Warrior convoy.

Also who exactly as in backs of multiple men is going to load up all that stuff into the truck and how many DAYS would that take to securely get in to a box with stacking efficiency AND to last it all down so nothing sways and falls during transport over roads that very likely will be less than flat & smooth as they are on any other normal day?
A logistics nightmare for anyone without a forklift and a shipping container with a prior computer analyzed packing map.

A bow and two or three arrows from a tree line fired sliently as soaked in starter fluid lit with a match just prior to firing is all that one would need to succesfully upend such a residence bunker. I'd aim for the roof and the upper story walls. : |